Posted on 09/02/2003 12:52:02 AM PDT by weegee
Blast that killed robber leaves police mystified
He died after a bank holdup. He told police another person had forced him into the crime.
Associated Press
ERIE - Investigators spent Labor Day plotting out a course for solving the bizarre case of a pizza deliveryman who robbed a bank, then was killed by a bomb strapped to his body.
An autopsy was completed yesterday on a coworker of the deliveryman who was found dead at his home, but police awaited toxicology tests to determine whether the deaths were related. Federal investigators and police were expected to discuss the case at a news conference today.
Authorities were trying to prove or disprove various theories, including whether 46-year-old Brian Douglas Wells was a willing or unwilling participant in the robbing of a bank in Northwestern Pennsylvania last week, State Police Cpl. Mark Zaleski said.
"We're doing a lot of administrative things with setting up various portions of the investigation, in assigning different investigators to different scenarios," Zaleski said yesterday.
During the robbery, Wells produced an "extensive" bank-robbery note containing multiple pages, Zaleski said. The note has been sent to a handwriting expert, he said, but it was unknown when the analysis would be completed.
Minutes before the bomb went off, Wells told officers who stopped him that someone had put a bomb with a timer on him and forced him to rob the bank. No one else was injured in the explosion.
About an hour before he turned up at the PNC Bank branch, Wells had gone to make a pizza delivery to a rural spot where a gravel road leads to a television transmission tower.
FBI spokesman Bill Crowley said investigators spent yesterday trying to "sharpen" the focus of the investigation and he declined to elaborate. The FBI has said Wells' death was being investigated as a homicide.
Chief Deputy Coroner Korac Timon said Wells died as a result of the bomb blast Thursday. He declined to release any other details about the autopsy.
Timon also would not discuss autopsy results of Wells' friend and coworker Robert Pinetti, 43, who was found dead Sunday at his home in Lawrence Park Township, Pa. Pinetti had refused medical assistance around 5 a.m. that day, and relatives found him unresponsive in his bed a few hours later, police said.
FBI calls bomb simple (Erie pizza delivery man bank robbery bombing)
Enquiring minds want to know.
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